New Features in BizTalk Server 2009

Overview

BizTalk Server 2009 introduces enhancements and new features in four main areas:

Support for the latest platforms from Microsoft including server, database and development environment.
Enhanced developer productivity and new application life cycle management experience for development teams.
New capabilities for implementing agile SOA integration solutions across heterogeneous technologies and Line of Business systems.
Enhanced B2B and RFID capabilities to allow the implementation of flexible end-to-end supply chain management and asset tracking solutions.

Updated Platform Support

BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools.

Support for Windows Server 2008 offers modular, minimal installation, improved network performance and control, improved high availability features, enhanced administration and management with Server Manager and Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface, and enhanced virtualization with Hyper-V™. By taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 clustering, BizTalk Server can now be deployed in multi-site cluster scenarios, where cluster nodes can reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs.

BizTalk Server 2009 takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.

In addition BizTalk Server 2009 full support for Sysprep, allow easy provisioning of server machines from images (both physical and virtual). This enhancement dramatically decreases the effort required to setup a new server or to scale out an existing configuration.
Support for SQL Server 2008 (while maintaining support for SQL Server 2005) offers better manageability and scalability, an optimized virtual SQL Server implementation, improved performance (especially in a 64-bit environment).
Support for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and NET Framework (v3.5) introduces a number of improvements to the underlying Visual Studio-based BizTalk project system: debugging support for artifacts s BizTalk maps (XSLT), enhanced BizTalk artifact property pages being integrated into Project Designer tabs, the latest Visual Studio Project Update Wizard and support for both release and debug builds.

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Developer & Team Productivity Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM)

BizTalk Server 2009 support Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Team Foundation Server. This enables the following capabilities:

Support for team development (including project manager, architects, developers, tester and ITPros.)
Seamless integration with Microsoft Project Server
Consistent automated application builds for ITPros with Microsoft build engine: MSBuild
Integrated source control
Bug tracking system
Support for unit testing

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SOA & Web Services

Enterprise Service Bus Toolkit 2.0

Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Toolkit 2.0 extends the capabilities of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 to support a loosely coupled messaging architecture.

By leveraging BizTalk Server’s powerful publish/subscribe engine and messaging sub-system; the ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides key building blocks for a comprehensive agile, service-oriented Infrastructures. Microsoft ESB 2.0 is founded on BizTalk Server 2009 to provide essential services, including the following:

Message routing, validation and transformation
Extensible adapter framework for connectivity
Service orchestration
Business rules engine
Business activity monitoring
Web service and WS-* integration (WCF adapter)

The ESB Toolkit 2.0 extends the functionality of BizTalk Server 2009 to provide a range of new capabilities focused on building robust, loosely coupled, service-oriented integration solutions. The following are some of the core capabilities provided by ESB Toolkit 2.0 to enhance BizTalk Server 2009:

Core Engine
▪ Alignment with BizTalk 2009 & VS.NET 2008 SP1
▪ Improved Caching, Configurability and Extensibility
▪ Resolver-Adapter Pack ( LDAP, SMTP, WCF-Custom) enables dynamic resolution of endpoints and transformation requirements, effectively decoupling the consumer from the services.
▪ Centralized itinerary store to support server-side itineraries, processing instructions that are dynamically added to messages upon receipt. Clients can be completely de-coupled from itineraries and the internal processes that will process their submitted messages.
▪ UDDI 3.0 support
Enhanced Itinerary Processing
▪ Execution of services (orchestrations, send ports, transformations and custom processing steps)
▪ Itinerary BAM tracking
Itinerary Designer
▪ Configurable composition of services using graphical Domain Specific Language (DSL) in Visual Studio
Improved Installation
Prescriptive guidance
▪ Patterns & pattern implementations
▪ Samples

Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI)

Version 3.0 of UDDI adds supports for:

registry affiliation
Subscription API
Support for digital signatures
Extended Discovery features

BizTalk Adapter Pack

The Windows Communication Foundation Line of Business (WCF LOB) SDK & BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 is now upgraded to the latest platform. In addition to enhancements to the existing adapters, the pack includes two new adapters:

The BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server
BizTalk Adapter for Oracle eBusiness Applications.

Improvements to Host Integration Server 2009 and the BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems

In addition to the new platform support, Host Integration Server now offers two new features: the WCF Channel for WebSphere MQ (Transport Channel, Data Format Channel Encoder), and the WCF Service for Host Applications (based on Transaction Integrator). Host Integration Server also offers support for new versions of IBM products such as CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, and DB2 Universal Database. Transaction Integrator now has a fully managed runtime, extended data conversions, and performance improvements. The Host Files & DB2 .NET Data Provider offer extended data conversions, performance improvements, the entity data model provider, Workflow Foundation for data activity scenario, an offline file load scenario, the BizTalk Adapter for WebSphere MQ, and a pipeline data conversion component which works with Visual Studio Designer.

Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

BizTalk Server 2009 provides new implementation for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, which enhances the BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring support for Microsoft Office Business Intelligence (BI) tools. BAM enhancements, support for Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) cubes in SQL Server Analysis Services, and scalable real-time aggregation.

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Business to Business Integration

BizTalk RFID

BizTalk RFID has been extended to mobile devices (such as handheld devices and forklift readers), and integrates with BizTalk Server. It also offers support for key industry standards, enabling the use of new readers with Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP), machine readable tag data standards (TDT for EPC), and Web Services for device management and Discovery, Configuration, Initialization (DCI).

Enhanced Support for EDI

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) represents approximately 75 percent of all business-to-business electronic transactions. EDI usage entails message syntax and standards (including ANSI X12, UN/EDIFACT and HIPAA), messaging protocols, and transports. BizTalk Server 2009 improves EDI support with the following enhancements:

Control of envelope headers: Flexibility to override envelope headers of the outgoing EDI documents
Automatic rollover of control numbers: Having the option to specify a range of EDI control numbers with automatic rollover
Configurable content delimiter character
Support for multiple batches per party: Allows users to create multiple batches per party with different Batching Criteria
HIPAA schemas now supporting equivalent segments
Updated reporting to cover all new features

Enhanced Support for AS2

EDIINT AS2 (Applicability Statement 2). AS2 is a specification that enables transport of business data (including EDI documents) over the Internet in a safe and reliable manner. BizTalk Server uses AS2-defined methods to send, receive, encrypt, decrypt, decompress, sign, and verify signatures between partners using HTTP over the Internet.

BizTalk Server 2009 expands these capabilities with the following improvements:

Support for multiple message attachments
Configurable auto message resend
End-to-end file name preservation
Improved reporting to address new features
Drummond re-certification

Removed features and tools

The following features and tools were available in BizTalk Server 2006, and are replaced by new features in BizTalk Server 2009:

Base EDI Adapter BizTalk Server 2009 includes support for processing EDI and AS2 messages using XSD-based EDI schemas and pipeline components. This feature replaces the Base EDI Adapter and schemas included in previous releases of BizTalk Server.
MSMQt Adapter The MSMQt adapter is not included in BizTalk Server 2009. To communicate with Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ,) use the MSMQ adapter.
Human Workflow Services (HWS) HWS is not included in BizTalk Server 2009. As an alternative for Human workflow solutions, you should now use Office SharePoint Server.
Business Activity Services (BAS) Business Activity Services (BAS) is not included in BizTalk Server 2009. You can use the EDI and AS/2 features for this functionality.
Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) Tool The tracked services and tracked messages reports that used to reside in the HAT module are now part of the New Query tab of the HUB group page.

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Additional Resources

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